“When people ask what I do with my art practice—am I a painter? a performance artist?—the best explanation is that I’m a transformer,” Selma Selman said when asked to describe her work. Indeed, the 33-year-old’s practice spans painting, performance, installation, and film, but central to everything is the act of transformation: of materials, social constructs, cultural signifiers, and, most often, combinations thereof.
Born in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of Romani origin, Selman currently divides her time between her hometown and Amsterdam, New York, and Washington, D.C. Her biography being integral to her work, family histories feature heavily, along with the involvement of family members in her performances. Many of her works, for example, feature scrap metal: her family owns a scrapyard, and she grew up collecting and selling scrap metal with her father and brothers. Recently, she spent two years working out a nontoxic method to extract gold from motherboards; then, in a series of performances titled Motherboards (2023–ongoing), she invited her brothers and father to help her perform the process in front of an audience. After one such performance in Hamburg, she had enough of the precious material to make Motherboards (A Golden Nail), 2023, a gold-covered nail hammered into a wall.
While her work is rooted in the personal, the strength of Selman’s art owes as much to its treatment and subversion of recognizable symbols. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘universal,’ but [the works] become planetary,” she said. “They could be understood—connected—by many other people.” In Selman’s world, luxury cars become scrap metal. Electronic waste becomes gold. Stigmatized labor becomes prestigious.
View of the performance Motherboards, 2023, at Gropius Bau, Berlin.
Photo Eike Walkenhorst
In a solo exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt that runs through September 15, Selman is showing, among other works, her newest film, Crossing the Blue Bridge (2024), which frames a site-specific performance centered on her mother’s memories of the Bosnian War. Works from a series of drawings titled “Superpositional Intersectionalism” (2023), meanwhile, were shown in a 2023 exhibition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau and in another earlier this year at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, Sweden. One drawing in the series, Ophelia’s Awakening, shares a title with a painting covering an entire Lotus car she completed earlier this year, with both pieces exploring a kinship with Shakespeare’s classic. “I feel a connection to Ophelia being forced to marry someone,” Selman said. “My father wanted me to marry someone, but I managed [to escape that]. I’m missing the point of Ophelia taking life into her own hands, so I’m trying to rewrite it—she’s a great symbol that can be reused for the resistance.”
Addressing intersectional oppressions faced by peoples around the world, Selman’s work resonates in many different contexts, with pointed transformations at its core. Much like the precision needed to dismantle a car into valuable sections of scrap metal, Selman makes it clear that nothing in her work is incidental or accidental: “If I have something to say, I’m going to say it,” she said. “If I don’t, I shut the fuck up. I don’t waste my words.”
